I remember the filmmaker being on Oprah. I remember screaming at someone else who was watching about how the guy was wasting that money. I got, “So what? It’s his money.” The end result was what I foresaw: The guy wound up homeless and penniless again.

I’m sure in this new and highly-exploitive CBS show, there will be Happy Endings — of a sort.

Google first pushes its updated Android software to the members of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), a consortium of more than 80 companies. Each manufacturer will then tweak the code for their respective devices. For example, Samsung must build TouchWiz — its unique skin, which modifies the look and feel and adds various distinguishing features — around each new version of Android. The same goes for HTC (Sense UI), LG, Sony and Motorola.

(For manufacturers that use a totally customized “fork” of Android — such as Xiaomi, Amazon and others — the customization road is an even more extensive process, but not really relevant to this conversation.)

If you have an unlocked (non-carrier specific) phone, that’s the end of the process — you get the update once the manufacturer distributes it. But for most of us (in the US, at least), the phone is bought through a wireless carrier, adding yet another layer of bureaucracy to the software update process.

None of this is anything new.

But I have to reiterate that Sony deserves credit for doing customers right by offering Android 5.x for so many of their older phones. Sony is basically hanging on to the mobile world by their fingernails. Meanwhile, market share behemoths I won’t name — and a new entrant I will name: ZTE — blithely move on to new phones and abandon the older ones. That is no way to impress customers and to engender brand loyalty.

It took a lot of time, but Google finally seems to have seen sense and understood that while microSD cards might not offer the best experience, they are something the smartphone market cannot live without, especially in the low-end and mid-range smartphone market. Unfortunately for buyers of Samsung’s newest flagships, the search giant’s new found acceptance of expandable storage is extremely ironic, as they will not be able to use a feature that many have long clamored for on the world’s most popular mobile operating system.

Google’s version of the feature divides your tablet’s screen into quadrants. You can run two apps side-by-side or stacked on top of each other by splitting the screen down the middle; three apps with one app on half the screen and two apps on the other half; or four apps by putting one in each quadrant.

Walt Mossberg, one of America’s two most famous tech columnists, shot himself in the foot. He left the “Wall Street Journal.” They’re finding out in news what we already know in music, you can go it alone, the internet allows you to do this, but in a chaotic world he with the established presence wins, the major record labels figured out the internet and the big news sites still rule.

And:

And then you’ve got David Pogue, Mossberg’s nemesis, who left the “Times” for Yahoo and was promptly buried in the tsunami of bogus information on that site. He went from being one of the two experts to a nobody.

And:

Bottom line… ReCode had the best tech news in the business. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher built a team of experts. But nobody cared, nobody went to the site, they thought their minions would follow them but it turned out they were aligned more with the “Wall Street Journal,” their former home, than the writers themselves.

He didn’t even mention Katie Couric, who is supposed to have gone to Yahoo too (did she? Bueller? Bueller?).

I should have seen all of this coming. When the two biggest mouths of book publishing — who touted self-publishing — quickly sold themselves out to Amazon, that was the warning sign.